January 22nd - 27th 1998

'Er Indoors and I spent a very enjoyable
weekend in Berlin, and managed to fit in two visits to the Berlin
Six. We flew British Airways from Manchester direct to Berlin
(they were offering cheap tickets, so it only cost us about 150
pounds each for the flights). We were staying with friends in
Berlin, but there are plenty of hotels in Berlin to suit all
budgets. In fact, the "official" hotel for the Berlin
six-day race is the Hotel Wilhelmsberg on the
Landsberger Allee - they offer single rooms at 135 DM per night,
or a double room at 175 DM (including breakfast). The city also
has excellent public transport, with the trams running a special
late-night service for visitors to the six-day, and the velodrome
is easy to locate and to get to.

The new indoor velodrome in Berlin is terrific.
It is located on the eastern part of the city on the Landsberger
Allee, which used to be called the Lenin Allee when I lived
Berlin in the early 1980's. Many of the old streetnames in East
Berlin have now been renamed to fit the new political realities.
But I digress; the velodrome is easily accessible either by tram
or by S-Bahn, with a direct passage into the velodrome from the
Landsberger Allee S-Bahn station.

The Berlin velodrome track is virtually
identical to the Manchester track at 250 meters. The spectator
facilities are good, with plenty of bars, comfortable seating,
lots of different food available around the track, plenty of
loos, and very short queues at the bars. All commentary was in
German, which was not a problem for me but may be important to
other visitors. However, the Berlin velodrome has the
best scoreboard that I have seen at any six-day race, with
regular displays of the overall positions (laps and points for
each team) and of the position within a particular race. The
organisers deserve credit for this, as the scoreboards at both
the Ghent and Munich six-days were hard to follow.

Oh, and several bike shops had stands in the
velodrome, a couple of which were flogging cycling clothing off
at very, very low prices. Fat Nick was delighted to pick up a
Telekom jersey for just ten pounds! The stadium was also
completely sold out, with 10,000 spectators turning out on
Saturday night and the same number again on Sunday afternoon for
the "family day".

A special treat for me during the Berlin Six
was the opportunity to see the big motors in action again
- I always enjoyed watching them at Leicester in the 1970's. Most
Sixes feature Derny
racing, with riders paced by a device
that is half motorbike, half moped, half sewing-machine, but the
Berlin Six also featured an amateur series of events paced by
proper, grown-up motorbikes (in this case, the motorbikes were
large BMW's). Watching them lap at over 50 miles per hour on a
250-metre track is quite something!

On the Saturday evening we had "standing
room only" tickets, which meant we were down in the track
centre. This sounds great, but it is actually quite difficult to
follow the racing from the middle of the track. Still, it gave me
an opportunity to say hello to our friend Angus (who was working
there) when he had a quiet moment. Another feature of the
Saturday session was the Telekom Challenge. Team boss Walter
Godefroot is reported to have banned his riders from the winter
six-day scene this season (which would explain the absence of
Giovanni Lombardi from the boards this winter), but Telekom
riders Giovanni Lombardi, Steffen Wesemann, Jan Schaffrath and
Erik Zabel took part in a special Devil-Take-The-Hindmost race
against the six-day regulars. This event went down well with the
German crowds, who simply cannot get enough of the Telekom team
since Jan Ullrich won the Tour de France in 1997. Interestingly,
the three German Telekom riders are all from the former East
Germany, and used to race on the tight, narrow indoor track at
the Werner Seelenbinderhalle that stood on the site of the new
velodrome. Keen historians may remember a certain Detlev Zabel
winning a big race there way back in 1950, and Detlev was there
to watch his son race this year.

We crawled home at 02:00 on the Saturday night,
and were up bright and early (in six-day terms!) on the Sunday in
order to catch a bit of the amateur race, which started at 11:30
in the morning. This was important, as British riders James
Notley and Jon Hargreaves (the current Manchester track league
champion) were riding the amateur Six in Berlin. We'd watched
James struggle in the amateur Six at Ghent, and it was good to
see Notley and Hargreaves working so well as a pairing in Berlin.
They were well on the pace, attacking on several occasions.
Despite Jon Hargreaves making a close-up inspection of the
back-straight carpentry when a change went a bit wrong, they also
managed to pick up second place in the final sprint of the day. I
look forward to watching them in more six-day events!

Match sprinting was also on the program. Most
of the top German sprinters were there - Eyk Pokorny, Jan Van
Eijden, Sören Lausberg, Jens Fiedler et al, along with
Australian Darryn Hill. Several of the sprinters are a little the
worse for wear after an incident in a Keirin race during the
recent Leipzig Six-Day race, which apparently sent one official
flying up the track, put several riders on the deck and which has
left Olympic champion Jens Fiedler with a metal plate holding his
broken collar bone in place. That didn't stop him winning the
sprints, of course. In the meantime, Fat Nick will try to dig out
the full story of the Leipzig tumble.

The actual six-day race itself was good. The
organisers in Berlin pride themselves on the fact that the
winners of every single six-day race so far this season were
riding in Berlin (with the exception of the Curuchet brothers,
who won in Medellin). Most other German stars were also in
attendance, with Erik Zabel riding the Telekom Challenge Devil,
and Olaf Ludwig signing autographs and handing out prizes. Ludwig
won last year's Berlin Six, and was especially pleased at being
able to give the prize for Sunday's Madison to Jens Veggerby, who
partnered him to victory last year in Berlin.

The lead seems to change quite frequently
during this race. When we left, Denmark's Jens Veggerby and Jimmi
Madsen were leading by a lap, but that won't last long as several
teams are about to be awarded a bonus lap (which is given every
time a team gets 100 points). Veggerby and Madsen took the
lead when they won the 60-minute Madison on Sunday. The action
was thick and fast, with most of the top teams putting in
attacks. Berlin was also a good opportunity to see many of the
new, up-and-coming German riders, and to see familiar riders in
new shorts as top stars such as Silvio Martinello, Adriano Baffi and Frank Corvers have all changed sponsors for 1998.

Tickets for the Berlin Six-Day race cost
between 50 DM and 70 DM. For information about bookings, contact
the booking office by phone on +49 30 30 69 69 69, or fax them on
+49 30 30 69 69 30.